Obama: Like a doctor with an unwilling patient

In the days leading up to the election of 2008, I was prepared to get on a plane to England where I would stay with an old friend until my husband could get the dog and cat prepped for emigration (a six-month UK program through which the UK quarantine can be legally avoided) and join me. Had the successor-in-interest to George W. Bush won that election, supported (if one cares to use that word) by his brainless Barbie doll running mate, it would have been impossible for anyone with a working brain and operational human emotions to live in this nation any longer. George W. Bush had done so much damage in so many arenas that it was hard to conceive how a successor cut from the same political cloth could help but make the disaster even worse. I was not willing to live in such a hapless, hopeless, helpless nation, a nation literally sick unto death.

I compulsively read Nate Silver's website, 538, looking for hope, and found it.

I was joyous on election night. It was such an important election night that I begged off meeting friends at a Democratic bar and grill to watch and celebrate; I wanted to savor our salvation at home with my husband, dog and cat, and know I would not now have to flee for my intellectual and emotional life, at the very least.

Since then, of course, the Republicans who managed to get elected or stay elected have been running their mouths and not much else, except the odd smear campaign in this year’s elections. The Republican dumbkopfs of the airwaves are still shaking their fists and turning red, something sufficient to convince the lower two-thirds of the electorate that Mr. Obama is somehow culpable for their economic distress. How can anyone forget Mr. Bush? How will we ever be able to forget Mr. Bush?

Mr. Bush is politically and economically leprous, and he has infected the entire nation with a malady that takes a while to appear, like leprosy, but when it does…..Oh, boy. Lepers, lacking feeling because the nerve ends have been ravaged by disease, lose fingers, toes, ears and noses without ever noticing it is happening, until repair is too late. It is no wonder Lincoln Mitchell wrote in the Huffington Post today:

“Problems only seem more complicated when they are examined more closely and the ability of the president to do much about them, particularly in the post-Bush period, is less than it seems.”

Mr. Obama is like a doctor trying to treat leprosy when the disease is still partly undiscovered, only a few of the abundant lesions having yet appeared. Worse, while he is trying to treat the infection delivered by Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Gonzales, Ms. Rice and a cadre of wet nurses to a nation’s disaster, the patient is being uncooperative. Even Democrats have whined that Mr. Obama is not fast enough. They forget that he has a systemic illness to cure, one that was lovingly nurtured by the above-named disease vectors for eight years; Mr. Obama hasn’t even yet located all the sites of infection yet. Not a day goes by that yet another soul-deadening, nation-destroying program of the Bush years isn’t uncovered. And even when Mr. Obama does find and alleviate some aging sores (please see yesterday’s column), people complain.

At the end of the day, one must know this: curing a systemic disease takes time, even when all the sites of infection are known and the cure is proven and readily available, none of which is the case with the sick nation that is, post-Bush, America. Curing that disease when the patient is intent on derailing one’s efforts might be next to impossible.

But I’ll take what we’ve got at the moment, a president with a brain and working emotions attempting to bring us back to the normalcy Mitchell sees already but for which I am merely hopeful.

Meanwhile, those who voted for Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey need not be proud of themselves this morning. In their ignorant efforts to “cure” their financial woes faster than any human possibly could―even FDR―they have given the infection new sites from which to attack the body politic and the moribund patient, the United States of America.

Pray only that by the mid-term congressional contests the patient will have regained sufficient health that no such infections are elected or re-elected to serve where it counts, in Washington, DC.